Shanghai authorities have come under fire after launching an anti-beggar
campaign in which repeat offenders were named and shamed on the internet.

The “Say No to Beggars On the Metro” campaign kicked off in mid-August when plain-clothes police were reportedly deployed on three key underground lines. Commuters were urged to report beggars using social media and a telephone hotline.

Most controversially, however, Shanghai police also published the identities of those repeatedly caught asking for money on a police micro-blog.

While some backed the crackdown on organised begging gangs, many commentators and micro-bloggers slammed the “public humiliation” of Shanghai’s most vulnerable citizens.

Their stories painted a grim portrait of life on the streets of one of China’s wealthiest cities, a place that is home to some of the most expensive real estate in Asia but also a significant street population with little if any access to social services.

According to the report, the beggar who had been detained the most – 309 times in total – was a severely disabled 22-year-old man who could not walk.

The number two offender – who had been taken in 303 times – was an 88-year-old gambling addict.

Offender number three was begging to fund his wife’s cancer treatment, it was reported. He had been detained 241 times.

An opinion piece in Monday’s Global Times newspaper said the police’s “ploy” to shame beggars had “backfired spectacularly.”

“It does the reputation of the police no good when they heap further humiliation and degradation on people at the very bottom of our society,” it argued.

Writing on his Twitter-like Weibo account, Lu Feng, a press officer for Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau, said the city needed to distinguish between genuine beggars and professionals, who made “good money.”

“The city we love rejects indifference, but it also needs order and security,” Mr Lu wrote.

“Most of the beggars are professionals,” a police official, Wu Chunyu, told the Jiefang Daily, pointing out that some beggars taken to “rescue centres” had refused police food, instead ordering KFC.

But Shanghai’s streets are also dotted with a neglected underclass of luckless beggars, often amputees from China’s impoverished countryside.

“My father and I came to Shanghai several months ago,” said one double-amputee from Anhui province who lost his legs in a car accident and was splayed out on a metal trolley in People’s Square on Monday afternoon.

“It is not shameful for us to beg on the streets, it is shameful for the government,” he added. “Why [did we come]? We can’t just wait to die, right?”

Outside a nearby branch of Starbucks, a woman sat on the pavement beside a tin mug filled with small change. She said she had lost both legs, her left arm and her husband after being electrocuted during a storm.

“I stepped on the fallen cables … and I became what I am now,” she said, weeping as she exposed a horribly mutilated body under her blouse.

“I can’t tell you the misery [of begging],” she added as commuters rushed past into the nearby underground station. “People look down on me. They say I faked all this. They don’t understand. They don’t sympathise.”

The woman admitted to knowing one beggar who “rented” a baby to garner pity but said her need was genuine.